From: grog@lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey)
Subject: [TUHS] Ideas for a Unix paper I'm writing
Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2011 14:13:02 +1000 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20110628041302.GR39651@dereel.lemis.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20110628001140.GA23711@minnie.tuhs.org>
On Tuesday, 28 June 2011 at 10:11:40 +1000, Warren Toomey wrote:
>
> I'm having some trouble thinking of the right way to explain what is
> an elegant design at the OS/syscall level, so any inspirations/ideas
> would be most welcome. I might highlight a couple of syscall groups:
> open/close/read/write, and fork/exec/exit/wait.
The system call interface is one thing, but I'm not sure it's the most
important one. Older operating systems (in my experience, IBM OS/360
and UNIVAC Omega and OS 1100) had similar interfaces. Omega also had
the concept of integer file descriptors (including 0, 1 and 2
preassigned). All of these systems had open/close/read/write, for
example.
I came to UNIX relatively late, and my first impression wasn't
favourable. It took me a while to realise what the real advantages
were. For me, they're:
- Text files. At the time, any data of any importance was stored in
custom-designed file formats. That was more efficient, both in
terms of processing time and space, but it made things difficult if
anything went wrong.
- The file system itself. I think the design of the file system,
especially the separation of names and the files themselves, but
also special files, is one of the most far-reaching designs I've
ever come across. To this day, I haven't found anything that even
comes close.
You might also get some ideas from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy
Greg
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2011-06-28 4:13 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 16+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2011-06-28 0:11 Warren Toomey
2011-06-28 0:26 ` Larry McVoy
2011-06-28 0:32 ` Nick Downing
2011-06-28 1:00 ` Tim Newsham
2011-06-28 3:36 ` Jim Capp
2011-07-02 4:03 ` Warner Losh
2011-08-07 20:26 ` Alan D. Salewski
2011-09-02 18:33 ` Jose R. Valverde
2011-06-28 3:53 ` Jim Capp
2011-06-28 4:13 ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey [this message]
2011-06-28 5:48 ` Nick Downing
2011-06-28 7:22 ` Tim Newsham
2011-06-28 14:18 ` Wesley Parish
2011-06-28 7:32 ` Wilko Bulte
2011-06-28 15:22 ` Al Kossow
2011-06-29 1:30 A. P. Garcia
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